


Well-Connected By Road (And Rail)

by applegnat



Category: Football RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-02-26
Updated: 2007-02-26
Packaged: 2017-10-05 10:39:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/40856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/applegnat/pseuds/applegnat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The bus is a getaway bus, in a sense. Sometimes Zlatan throws something at it to watch it burn, and then gets in it anyway. Sometimes he thinks he should get a family sedan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Well-Connected By Road (And Rail)

**Author's Note:**

> canarycreams prompted me to list **'five places where ibra will never take nesta.'** this excited me so that it ended up becoming – something quite different. not quite what i'm used to, but i loved writing it.
> 
> a very small, spun-sugar story.

Some of the prettiest things he ever saw as a kid were those framed posters doctors and school principals put up in their offices: solidly hypercoloured photographs of tulip gardens and shaggy dogs and rolling grasslands printed over with proverbs. A kingfisher pecking at an outstretched human finger – 'a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.' A toothless, grinning infant demonstrated 'smile and the world smiles with you!' He'll never forget the cake-like Swiss farmhouse at the dentist's. _Home is where the heart is._ Zlatan's heart has never, at least upon semi-serious examination, been in Switzerland.

Long journeys, international flights, real estate on three continents, and it might start to look like there's some overpopulation in the cardiac area, because Zlatan's always laughed at the idea that home is where the heart is. It's always been the other way around for him. Home is an idea that starts somewhere in the head. Or in the heart. It's more trouble to distinguish between the two than people commonly realise. He carries a home around with him, wherever he goes. It's a white-and-green bus. There is a bus somewhere inside Zlatan Ibrahimovic's head. It has large open windows with steel bars across the bottom and hard Rexene seats. He used to take one to school and another, exactly like the first, to football practice. They don't make them like that anymore, even the ones that go to Rosengard.

The bus is a getaway bus, in a sense. Sometimes Zlatan throws something at it to watch it burn, and then gets in it anyway. Sometimes he thinks he should get a family sedan.

Sometimes he thinks of sitting on a rickety seat, knee hoisted up and digging hard into the wood of the seat in front, and Sandro sitting next to him, scrunching up his face against the sharp white summer sunlight and the dust of the journey. He doesn't like being on the road.

Buses, Sandro explodes. I fucking hate buses. Everyone's always talking. Or no one is. Everything is small. You can't stretch your legs. You can't read properly. You can't take a piss.

In this world there are people who take the bus, and people who take the train. Sandro was the sort of child who couldn't think of a cooler ride to have than a hundred-wheeled electric monster. He loves trains. He once spent hours on a rail map of the Lazio region, tracing routes here and there with his long fingers, gathering stations and numbers at their tips.

My father worked at a signal here, he said, and also here, and here, and we lived in a colony here, along this route, and I used to take this to school, and this to go to the city, and we used to have to wait for this train to go back home after Sunday evening matches, because we always stayed the full game and missed the regular service. I wanted to drive along this one, just once.

Zlatan asked him if he ever managed to drive it, and he laughed. Would I ever have shut up about it if I had, he asked.

Neither of them have ever been on the Milan Subway. It might be fun. They could start at Milano Centrale. Smile at the shocked commuters, some of whom will surely be plainclothes _tifosi_ who no longer dared enter a compartment with fans from the other _curva_ on a derby night. Stand on their toes, swap sections of the paper, read it like practised travellers, folded lengthwise into sixths. They could kiss as they hung from the ceiling straps, if it weren't an impossible thing.

Zlatan grins when he thinks about it. Sometimes he grins when he thinks about taking him home to his parents and telling them that this is his boyfriend. He's pretty sure Sandro could defend himself from his father, but his mother has a sneaky and terrific arm with the cutlery. He looks at Sandro and thinks that he's probably never had to dodge plates hurled out of the kitchen. (Although sometimes he watches Sandro's frown and deduces that petulance cannot have been entirely absent from Signora Nesta's lifestyle.) Not that he'd ever take him to his parents' home. The food isn't half as good as it is in Italy, anyway.

Once he found Sandro tucked away in a stairwell at the Curva Sud, the afternoon before a game, puffing away at a cigarette. Zlatan hasn't tried one since he was thirteen, out of a general disinclination to set off any smoke detectors on his way out of, well, everywhere. They sat side by side in the dankness, Zlatan breathing in the smell of tobacco and last weekend's sweat, highly amused at their minor rebellion. Can't let the kiddies see, Sandro said mockingly, scratching his knee. Maybe they should see this, Zlatan said, and kissed him, all soft mouth and stinging gasps of air. It reminded him of the night he spent in jail, trying to bail out a friend with the money he had, except it wasn't half as much fun. He took a bus out of there when dawn came, pockets empty, a sleeping junkie boy who'd sold his underwear for a fix crushing him against the glass.

Smoke? Sandro offered.

Coke, he said, and laughed himself silly at the look on Sandro's face. We could go to prison together.

Very romantic, Sandro said. The pigs'd watch us through the bars.

They laughed, loudly and very irresponsibly, until the empty dungeon of the lower stands rang with their voices. Zlatan loves how unreasonably Italians hate their cops.

Sometimes the bus stops in a field of dirt and sun, mottled with grass in dull patches. And Zlatan gets off bounces one, three, thirty footballs off the emptiness. Making teams in international championships and having his ass occasionally handed to him on a plate mostly hasn't stopped him from wishing that they could field two footballs in a game, just so that he'd have more to play with.

We'd all be dead at twenty-five, Sandro says practically. Having one to kick around is fucked up enough.

The bus is not a big deal, he thinks sometimes, in a distant, accepting way, like he thinks that the weather's turned cold, or that his sheets need washing. It's probably not very inviting. But he's not offering anyone a leg up.

Window or aisle, he asks Sandro once. It's humid and sticky and Sandro's in a bad mood.

I'm walking, he says, and wanders off.

The thing with Sandro is that he's a bit of a smartass. He tries hard to keep a lid on it, which makes him a tad repressed, but that's also because he's smart. Zlatan doesn't think he'd like him half as much if he wasn't.

The wind's in his hair and the sour steel of the window rails carves itself, cold and gentle, into his cheek. He likes to fancy that he can make out someone trudging along in front of him, kicking up heat and dust, if he squints.

It isn't exactly a poster, but Zlatan doesn't have an office to hang one up in, anyway.


End file.
